A Catholic priest responds to queries on faith, the Bible, religion, Catholic practice, etc. posed by readers.
What he doesn't know, he makes up.

Friday, November 15, 2013

Letter to Lee Turjiste -- part 4

Letter to
Lee Turjiste, continued.

Baptisms and
Funerals! Here I am really torn. On the one hand, if you say “No” to someone
who wants to have a child baptized, they will probably be angry enough to never
darken the door of your church again. If you say “Yes” to someone who rarely
comes to church and is in no sense a member of the parish, or even a practicing
Catholic, they will probably never darken the door of your church again either.
That is until it’s time for the kid’s first communion. You will see them again
for weddings, confirmations and other photo events.

If you say
“No”, it’s goodbye. So most priests want to be pastoral and say “Okay, but
you’ve got to start coming to church.” “Okay, Father we will.” And they do come:
three times — 7, 13 and about 25 years after the baptism. Here is a typical
phone call:

(Bridezilla)
“Hello, Are you the priest?”

(Pastor)
“Yes I am.”

(B) “I want
to rent your church for my wedding.”

(P) “Are you
a parishioner? “

(B) “......
(long pause)...yes I am.”

(P) “What’s your
name?”

(B) “I’m
Diadora Shickelgruber. Certainly you remember me, Father.”

(P) “I can’t
say that I do.”

(B) “Well I
probably go to the service you don’t celebrate.”

(P)”I say
most of the Masses and am always in the vestibule after Mass. Why do you want
to be married here at St. Dymphna’s?

(B) “I went
to school there and got all my sacraments there. When I was little I always
dreamed of walking down that aisle on my wedding day.”

(P) “Are you
currently attending another church?”

(B) “Oh yes,
Father. When we’re not at your church we go to a church closer to our house.”

(P) What is
the name of the church?”

(B) “I can’t
remember it right now.”

(P) “Because
you live twenty miles away, don’t attend regularly, and are not registered
here, I am going to need a letter of permission from the pastor of the church
you normally attend.”

(B) “....long
silence....How do I get that?”

(P)
Introduce yourself to your pastor after Mass and he will tell you how to make
an appointment.”

(B) “Oh.”
Click. Phone goes dead.

They are
either going to have a wedding in the park with the local shaman, or they are
going to pester the nearest Catholic priest who has also never met them for a
letter of permission until weakened by hunger and fatigue he gives it to them.
If not they will write a long letter to the bishop pointing out that their
grandfather gave a lot of money to the parish and the priest treated them
terribly. Some diocesan functionary will call and Father will give in.

The bride
invariably shows up dressed like a frigate in full sail at which point I am
tempted to wax eloquent on the beauties of virginity symbolized by the reams of
white lace and taffeta in which she is festooned, but that would just evoke another
letter to the bishop about how un-pastoral I am and so I preach a few
platitudes that will sound inoffensive on the video. And so the cycle starts
all over again.

We will see
them again a few years later when they want a baptism or something like it; or
someone they love, or at least fell guilty about, needs burial. We, the clergy,
refer to this sort of religion as “hatch, match and dispatch.” However, this is becoming much less common.
Very few, except homosexuals, wedding co-coordinators and divorce lawyers think
that it’s important to get married anymore; and most Catholics think birth
control is just fine. This abandonment of the sacramental life eases up the
pressure for baptisms, weddings and, oddly enough, even for funerals.

Ever since,
at the urging of Margaret Sanger (Foundress of Planned Parenthood), Drs. Pincus
and Rock invented the birth control pill in the early 1950's, things have been
changing. Puerto Rico was selected as a trial site in 1955. I suppose Puerto
Rico was chosen because the US government was already trying to reduce the
number of Puerto Ricans in the world with a string of birth control clinics on
the island. Perhaps Ms. Sanger, former friend of and collaborator with Adolph
Hitler, figured there were more Puerto Ricans than anyone wanted or needed.
Perhaps she figured if it worked on Catholic Puerto Ricans, it would work on Catholic
Mexicans, of whom Ms. Sanger also thought there were way too many, even back
then.

Guess what?
Puerto Ricans went for it despite their Catholicism and now most Puerto Ricans
aren’t Catholic. They are an aging population that has lost much of its beautiful
art and culture. Ms. Sanger couldn’t give a fig for their wonderful food,
delightful music, beautiful painting and wood carving. They were the wrong
color and the wrong religion as far as she was concerned, so let’s test the
pill on them. Those who renounced their faith in order to have a more relaxed
reproductive morality and a higher standard of living soon also renounced their
culture, and eventually renounced their progeny.

Having
devastated the Puerto Rican family, Planned Parenthood went on to devastate the
families of the USA proper. Catholic faith had not stood in the way of modern
narcissism in Puerto Rico and it would not stand in the way of the reduction of
the European American population of the United States, even though the birth
control pill had been designed by Sanger to get rid of all those brown and
black people cluttering up our lily white shores.

How, you may
ask does this take the pressure off for funerals in Catholic churches? We just
had an example here at St. Dymphna’s in Frostbite Falls. An elderly woman died
who had been active here as long as her health held out. After that, the family
put her in a very nice home. The woman had only one daughter. The daughter
didn’t seem very interested in having a large family and so there were only two
resultant grandchildren. Like their mother, they had little use for grandma. I
don’t think she got a lot of visits.

When I heard
that she had died, I was curious that no one had requested a funeral. It turns
out that she had died a while ago and no one had told us. The daughter said that they thought it
foolish to go to the bother and expense of a funeral. They cremated grandma and
went their merry ways. They all had lives to live. So it is, that there are fewer and fewer
funerals because there are fewer and fewer left to grieve and even fewer to
pray for the dead.

Our small
families have relieved us of the economic and financial burden of former times. The one or two children we thought
optimal were given everything except faith. Why should the little narcissists
mourn the dead? We gave them everything but never mentioned that they in turn
should be generous. The death of a grandparent is cause for rejoicing. The few
descendants are freed from the guilt of never visiting Grandma and now they get
all her money. Having not wasted her money on a brood of demanding little rug
rats, Grandma had amassed a tidy sum, which her one or two heirs, or their
lawyers will divide. Why waste any of it on a funeral that no one wants? No one
but Grandma, that is.

Remember
that scene in Dickens’ Christmas Carol? Having used his finances very
prudently, old Scrooge is un-mourned by anyone. The ghost of Christmas future
shows him his own overgrown grave. That poor dear woman I mentioned above does
not even have an overgrown grave. I imagine her ashes were scattered, or maybe
they are somewhere in the basement to be thrown out with the rest of her stuff.

When there are still enough people who
remember religion in some form, they schedule a funeral in a church where the
deceased may have more or less gone. They want the choir, the eulogy, the
sermon, the wake, the grave side, the whole nine yards and a video of the
proceedings... The most crazy-making thing that I get asked at funerals is
about scheduling. I have actually had people request a funeral months in
advance. When I looked confused and asked isn’t that a long time to wait? They responded, “Oh no Father, she’s not dead
yet, but she will be by then. We have to get everybody on the same page as to
the best date of the funeral. We have to check our calendars and we won’t take
her off life support until we have a tentative date picked.” I thought I was
dealing with a family of vampires.

It is now
very common to put grandma on ice, or if it’s going to be a really long time
before the calendars open up, Grandma will be burned and there will be a
“Memorial Service” whatever that may be. The modern mourners haven’t a clue
what Mass is about especially if they are born in the USA. They want the whole
enchilada and they darn well better get it. After all, they are paying for it!
And these are people who know the value of a dollar! They certainly haven’t
wasted any of it on having large families.

Of fifty
Americans at many funerals, perhaps two of them will be under the age of 30. Do
you really think those two remnants of once Catholic large families will bother
to have funeral masses for the childless multitude around them? When I offer a
funeral Mass, my grief is very real. I don’t however grieve for the departed
whom I have probably never met; I grieve for a way of life, a culture and a
community of faith that has died.

The Church
is growing: Africa, China, the Philippines, South America, Korea and so many
emerging cultures are on fire with faith. There has never been a time when so
many Muslims converted to Christianity. The faith is made glorious by those
made martyrs by their Muslim neighbors.

The faith is
not dying, the culture is. We have chosen ourselves over the God who made us
and loves us. We are now 60 years, give or take, after the invention of the
little golden pill, (as the singing nun called it). We have been born into the
birth-controlled, baby boomer consumerist revolution and are reaping the reward
of our own narcissism: extinction.

1 comment:

You know what I mean – three days of keening and boozing, with the odd Rosary thrown in. The deceased’s life gone over with a fine toothcomb – or a swizzle stick. Good and bad stories (mostly good) will be told, tears will be shed and laughter (muted) heard. There might even be music (Uilleann pipes, preferably - but fiddles and a Bodhrán are acceptable…) with a jig or reel to shake the walls.

Then when everyone - having sobered up, mostly - gets to the actual funeral there would be no need for eulogies as all that could be said would have been said. Photos would be verboten also. Who wants to be recorded in aeternum with a hangover? The deceased will have been given “a good send-off” and all can go home happy in the knowledge that a good time was had by all, even the deceased – had he or she been a more active participant…

Rev. Know-it-all

About Me

Rev. Know-it-all is the alter ego of Fr. Richard Simon, Pastor of St. Lambert Parish, Skokie, IL.
Now a regular host of Relevant Radio's "Fr. Simon Says", Fr. Simon spent over 20 years "...teaching dead languages to comatose seminarians."
Credits: The Reverend Know-It-All is a parody of Mr. Know-It-All, the alter ego of Bullwinkle J. Moose, a carton character created by Jay Ward (1920-1989).